Some explanation: I am on social security disability, and have been since 2008. The amount raised for cost of living slowly falls behind and the purchasing power shrinks a little with each year. There has been a push for a long time to change how COLA is calculated to make those raises even smaller, but that isn’t what this is really about. Just part of the background noise for why I have email alerts suggesting jobs to apply for.
Honestly? I probably couldn’t safely do those jobs. I managed to put myself in acute kidney failure caring for my husband when he was dying, and then again helping a single mom with childcare a few years later. I can’t predict good days vs bad days. The last ten years of my working life I was usually on written warnings for too many absences, and receiving performance reviews that said things like, “great worker, excellent employee, but doesn’t come to work enough.”
This is to explain why I made the mistake of signing up for a couple websites that promised me local job listings including work from home (yeah, I know NOW it is just a scam to sell my phone number to marketers and worse, but I didn’t know it then). That being said, since Trump did the “companies will eat the tariffs and not raise prices” proclamations, I have noticed a sad trend:
The starting wages offered by Amazon and Walmart have dropped, at this point, more than $2/hour since December.
See, as far as company owners go, in the larger companies (the ones making billions every year), they need x amount of profit to pay their shareholders every year or they aren’t doing a good job. The tariffs have increased their costs. If they can’t share those costs with their customers, they have to find another place to make up that profit, so… the next easy place to manage these expenses is in the “human resources” segment of their supply chain.
So… when you see layoffs happening, know that tariffs will also give these people a major pay cut if they can get another job, and the Big Beautiful Bill is cutting assistance that made getting by on $36,000/year for a family of four a heck of a lot harder than it already was.
Anyhow. It is ironic that I even open these, but I found the pattern curious, and decided I should make people aware.
Be kind to everyone. You don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. Thank you for reading, sharing and subscribing.